Directive 51 [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

John Barnes' novels have a tendency to tackle big ideas. It's hard enough to tackle one big idea in a novel (e.g., Vernor Vinge's "zones of thought" in A Fire Upon The Deep, or the nature of reality in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"), but Directive 51 takes on three: how the Internet can amplify emergent behavior to a level never before seen in civilization, even developing self-reinforcing mechanisms (this is a variant of the Meme War idea in some of his earlier books); a new take on the perils of technology (there are some very scary "what ifs" here); and an interesting take on continuity of American government and the fragility (or ultimate stability) of our Constitution. He does a fine job in teeing up these ideas and exploring them, but it seems almost too much for a single book, with the result (as other reviewers have noticed) that the characters lose out. I found that there were only a few whom I actually cared about (hint: they were not the Daybreakers), yet they got insufficient page count to really flesh them out. If this book is the first of several, then it may come off better as an introduction to the subsequent novels than standalone.

Despite the flaws, I found it an enjoyable (albeit scary) read precisely because of the ideas.

WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead

I was really looking forward to reading Directive 51 after it was mentioned in the Atlantic's article re: cyberwarfare. I'm a sucker for end-of-the-world scenarios and I'm usually profoundly disappointed with their execution (2012, I'm looking at you). This book, sad to say, was no different.

The premise is interesting and had real potential for making a gripping novel about the end of the modern era and how people would cope with a disaster that wiped out everything we relied upon for the functioning of our society. Unfortunately, the characters you have access to are emerge relatively unscathed from the disaster and you are therefore not really exposed to the breadth and depth of the horror.

The book focuses almost exclusively on the members of the federal government charged with forecasting future threats, who then become the heads of state when the disaster takes hold. As such, they aren't really affected by the loss of power, of food, of clean water, of all modern conveniences. The book references entire cities burning to the ground, millions dying of starvation during the winter, thousands freezing to death while fleeing cities... but those events are presented when the main characters present "reports from the field" to other members of the government. You get no on-the-ground experiences of what it's like for people actually living through the event. The members of the government are cloistered in protected compounds with supplies of power, food and water. You're totally detached from the "reality" of the situation for 99.999% of the Earth's population and, as such, it's snooze-ville for disaster enthusiasts.

In addition, the plot itself suffers from a lot of weak spots. The connection between the main saboteurs and the Islamic terrorists is weakly explained and eventually just left for dead. The ability of hobby enthusiasts to resurrect dead trades and get museum-piece locomotives working seemed a bit too convenient and easy. And then, just when you think it can't get more implausible, the author throws in EMP bombs assembled by self-assembled robots on the moon and launched back to Earth... out of the blue, without much explanation at all of how they got there in the first place, who was involved with that segment of the conspiracy or really any explanation. It was the last straw for me.

To add insult to injury, the author falls back upon just about every tired end-of-the-world trope in this book. Sure, the main characters are an overweight redhead and a disabled man, instead of the usual pretty people that populate these books, but the author still gives us the same old romance between the two protagonists.

My verdict: Give it a miss, or wait for the inevitably bad movie.

In Directive 51, the author raises some really interesting ideas but they're buried in a bog of uninteresting and redundant back-and-forth about constitutional and line-of-succession questions. There's a lot of what feels like filler here- perhaps that's because this is apparently the first installment in a trilogy. The reader is left feeling at a curious distance from the action; yes, tens of millions of people die, but it mostly happens "off-screen" and the whole catastrophe seems rather clinical. As I said, John Barnes does get at some provocative issues, such as the possibility that our line-of-succession process could leave us with an incompetent, elderly senator as our President. There are hints that the Daybreak event may have been engineered by forces not of this Earth- guess we'll have to wait for the sequel to see if that's the case. Would I buy Book 2 in hardback ? Nope- not unless Barnes avails himself of the services of an excellent editor first.

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